Boosting Clinic Efficiency: Strategies to Monitor Productivity and Improve Client Show Rates

Does clinic efficiency matter? Losing track of your clinic’s productivity and client show rates can be detrimental to your profitability.

Our third entry on the FAQ page goes into a fair amount of detail about why, so we won’t go back through the math here.

Let’s summarize by saying poor productivity can cost even a small clinic hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month.

Monitoring Productivity Trends

How do you prevent poor productivity from creeping into your clinic? First and foremost, you need to monitor your productivity trends. You can do this in a variety of ways, including:

Firstly, you can monitor a graph of your clinic’s overall productivity over time. This can give you a good feel for how your overall clinic is changing and moving forward.

Secondly, you may even want to monitor these graphs for each provider. This is especially important if they are responsible for managing their schedules. They may be lax in rescheduling or filling in cancellations.

Thidly, a time series graph can help you monitor whether they are improving or worsening on these trends.

Last but not least, you may also wish to monitor trends at your individual locations, by insurance, or by discipline.

Utilizing Time Series Graphs

It’s also a good idea to monitor snapshots of the productivity of each individual provider over a specified period, such as per pay period.

Most clinics will pull that data as part of payroll – a spreadsheet that will tell you the number of scheduled hours a provider worked; the number of productive hours one is seeing patients during that time; overseeing assistants; doing paperwork; and the resulting hour-based productivity.

This is an excellent tool to get a quick glimpse of your providers’ efficiencies over a given time period.

Snapshot Assessments of Provider Productivity

In addition to encouraging employees to improve their scheduling trends, a great way to improve productivity is to remove patients with poor show rates from the schedule.

Routinely identifying patients with the worst show rates and evaluating whether or not the show rates warrant action is critical to your clinic’s health.

If you have a patient with a poor show rate over a specified period of time, you may want to pull a show rate trend graph to assess how long their poor show rate has been a problem.

Sometimes it is a short-term problem due to health issues or other short-term problems. It may, however, be a chronic problem with a patient.

Enhancing Scheduling Trends

With that information, you can contact them to inform them their continued failure to attend scheduled visits may result in their removal from your clinic.

This warning typically gets people in for their scheduled visits more routinely. If it doesn’t, be sure to follow through with removing them from the schedule.

It is helpful to set a policy that patients agree to in writing, stating they will maintain a minimum 80% show rate. This protects your right to dismiss them from your clinic due to poor attendance.

As we’ve shown in the FAQ, poor attendance doesn’t just mean limited profit. It actually COSTS you money to see them if it drops low enough.

Monitoring and improving your clinic’s productivity and client show rates are essential steps toward achieving financial stability and growth.

By leveraging time series graphs, snapshot assessments, and proactive patient management strategies, you can ensure your clinic operates at its highest efficiency.

At KCD Pros, we provide comprehensive consultation services to help you implement these tools effectively. Contact us today to learn how we can support your clinic’s success.